![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/f7fc4a9720e69dc3621defdd5a7376aaa5-EVCBBOOK-1B.rsquare.w700.jpg\")
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\n East Village Cookbook has become an unlikely phenomenon among collectors.
\n Photo: Ryan John Lee\n <\/p>\n
The hopeful trope is that cookbooks remain a bright spot within the otherwise-troubled publishing industry. The hundreds of high-production, gorgeous tomes produced in 2025 included new books by Alison Roman<\/a>, Samin Nosrat<\/a>, and Molly Yeh<\/a>; Joshua McFadden\u2019s follow-up to his Six Seasons blockbuster<\/a>; and even an ode to the Steak House, by Eric Wareheim<\/a>. But the year\u2019s top-selling cookbook at Matt Sartwell\u2019s Kitchen Arts & Letters<\/a> on the Upper East Side was something else entirely, a comb-bound community cookbook that was only supposed to be a collection of crowd-sourced recipes printed out and stapled together to raise a little money for a soup kitchen and food pantry. Instead, East Village Cookbook<\/a> has become a certified hit, found a global audience, won an award for its design, and \u2014 crucially \u2014 remains in demand. \u201cEvery few weeks, Matt orders more books for Kitchen Arts & Letters and we pack up more cases in the church basement and drive them up to the store,\u201d says chef, author, and one of the cookbook\u2019s creators Will Horowitz.<\/p>\n If you crossed a zine with a Junior League Charleston Receipts, you would get East Village Cookbook, whose subtitle \u2014 Adventures, Anecdotes and Tales of a Downtown New York Neighborhood Told Through Our Food \u2014 actually doesn\u2019t do enough to capture the richness, fullness, and proud \u201cweirdness\u201d of the book itself. \u201cThe mishmash of different cultures and palates is evocative of community cookbooks of my childhood in the 1970s,\u201d says Gloria Kusano, a schoolteacher and cookbook collector in Toronto, who discovered the book on a chef\u2019s Instagram feed and was taken with the neighborhood focus. \u201cThe breadth and collaboration of neighborhood mom-and-pop shops, hipster ideations, and celebrity establishments sharing their coveted recipes is what makes this such a special cookbook.\u201d<\/p>\n The book got its start during the COVID lockdown, when Horowitz, middle-school teacher Dan Hyatt, and Reverend Will Kroeze from Trinity Lower East Side<\/a> bonded during dog walks in Tompkins Square Park. They took the long history of community cookbooks as their inspiration to raise funds for Trinity\u2019s Services and Food for the Homeless, now marking its 40th anniversary of dishing up a hot lunch five days a week and running a food pantry; 200,000 meals a year are served. During a surge of asylum seekers arriving in New York, the nearly 200-year-old church on the park at Ninth Street was serving 400 to 500 people daily.<\/p>\n The three began posting \u201crecipes needed\u201d flyers around the neighborhood, which led to EV Grieve writing<\/a> a story. That caught the attention of Champions<\/a>, a design firm on Avenue A (whose past clients include the Girl Scouts and the MTV VMAs) that had been looking for a \u201cgive-back\u201d to cement its connection to the neighborhood where it has had offices for a decade and a half. \u201cWhen we offered our services, they were thinking a stapled book, half-letter size, with all community recipes,\u201d says designer Michael McCaughley. \u201cWhen we learned about the soup kitchen and all the incredible work they did on a daily basis, we decided on a more ambitious design.\u201d Champions chose the classic community-cookbook template as a jumping-off point, honoring that legacy while adding real polish. \u201cBlack ink on white paper is the one continuity; the vellum dust jacket is the most premium aspect of the production,\u201d he says. (McCaughley, who is from Dublin, and his mom, Marian, also contributed a recipe for a chicken-broccoli bake.) Horowitz was also able to corral the editor from his William Morrow\u2013published book Salt, Smoke, Time to take on \u201cediting the whole book pro bono,\u201d which is partly why the book\u2019s recipes work so well and the index is so useful.<\/p>\n \n A flyer asking for recipes. Brooks Headley<\/a>\u2019s pepperoni sweet potatoes have become a regular addition to my table. Veselka<\/a> contributed recipes for its meat-stuffed cabbage and its mushroom-stuffed cabbage. Momofuku Noodle Bar<\/a>\u2019s spicy cucumbers are there as well. So are notecards for banana nut bread and \u201cour great-grandma\u2019s oatmeal cookies\u201d from local residents Lara and Nina Burns. Alan Cumming<\/a> provided a narrative recipe for stovies \u2014 \u201ca Scottish dish traditionally made with beef dripping, but I am vegan so I have made up my own version,\u201d he says \u2014 while neighborhood artifacts like the Landmarks Preservation marker for Charlie Parker\u2019s residence get their own pages. Carrot-ginger salad dressing is credited to \u201cevery single East Village sushi restaurant in the Eighties.\u201d (And of course there are lemon bars, requisite in any community cookbook.)<\/p>\n \u201cThe book is staying true to the neighborhood it represents, a part of NYC that is sadly waning,\u201d says Wylie Dufresne, who contributed his family\u2019s recipe for Thanksgiving stuffing. \u201cIt\u2019s not really even about the recipes. It\u2019s more a compilation of the oral traditions of the East Village put down on paper. Much like the East Village itself, the book is a holdout against the way things seem to be heading, which is the best compliment I can give it!\u201d<\/p>\n The book is available on the church\u2019s website as a premium for a donation ($32 to $1,000), but it might have languished like so many Pride of Peoria\u2013esque compilations if not for Sartwell, who tends to celebrate passion projects. \u201cHe carried the book as a nonprofit for the first months, sending us a check as a donation,\u201d explains Horowitz, who says that in addition to the social-media reach of the included chefs \u2014 orders have come in from as far away as the Netherlands and South Africa \u2014 getting the cookbook into Kitchen Arts & Letters has been crucial to its success.<\/p>\n \u201cIf it had been all fancy restaurants, it wouldn\u2019t have resonance,\u201d Sartwell says. \u201cPeople who grew up in the East Village contributed recipes that have been in their families for generations. New York is a hard city to distill, but not that neighborhood.\u201d He adds that it is one of the most satisfying books to sell because the design, \u201ca slick spin on the classic,\u201d feels exactly right. He also notes the East Village aspect of its origin story: \u201ca nice Jewish boy teaming up with a Lutheran church.\u201d<\/p>\n Don Lindgren, of the Maine-based vintage-cookbook seller Rabelais<\/a>, is on his third volume of an encyclopedia of community cookbooks. He considers East Village an essential addition to the canon: of and by a community and for a good cause. It reminded him of an earlier New York compilation: Greenwich Village Gourmet: Favorite Recipes of 100 Village Artists, Writers, Musicians and Theatre People, published in 1949. That book includes Pete Seeger\u2019s fried rice, Milton Avery\u2019s \u201cbasic spaghetti,\u201d Eleanor Roosevelt\u2019s huckleberry pudding, and Chaim Gross\u2019s gefilte fish. East Village, by contrast, showcases \u201creal\u201d residents as well as famous names and restaurants.<\/p>\n \u201cI think we\u2019re all tired of high-production, high-polish food,\u201d says Marco Canora, who sold East Village Cookbook at his restaurant Hearth<\/a> during the holidays \u2014 he contributed recipes for broth and\u00a0stracciatella soup \u2014 and went through his supply quickly. \u201cEspecially with this AI slop we\u2019re heading into, it feels handmade; it feels old-world.\u201d<\/p>\n EAT LIKE THE EXPERTS.<\/p>\n Sign up for the Grub Street newsletter.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/4ab8dabc07d09ce68582a0ea7b27349d53-image0--10-.rsquare.w570.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Courtesy of the subject\n <\/p>\n